Happy birthday, Hoppy.
William Boyd (June 5, 1895 - September 12, 1972)
Biography for
William Boyd
Height
6' (1.83 m)
Mini biography
The son of a day laborer, his family moved to Tulsa OK when he was seven. His parents died while he was in his early teens, forcing him to quit school and take up jobs as a grocery clerk, surveyor, and oil field worker. He went to Hollywood in 1919, already grey haired. His first role was as an extra in Cecil B. DeMille's Why Change Your Wife? (1920). He bought some fancy clothes, caught DeMille's eye, and got the romantic lead in The Volga Boatman (1926), quickly becoming a matinee idol earning $100,000 a year. With the end of silent movies, Boyd was without a contract and going broke. By mistake his picture was run in a newspaper story of the arrest of another William Boyd for illegal whiskey and gambling. In 1935 he was offered the part of Hop-Along Cassidy (1935) (named because of a limp induced by an earlier bullet). He changed the original pulp-fiction character to its opposite: didn't smoke, drink, chew tobacco or swear, rarely kissed a girl, let the bad guy draw first. By 1943 he had made 54 "Hoppies" for his original producer Harry Sherman; after Sherman quit, Boyd made 12 more on his own. All the movies made a 100 percent profit or better. In 1948 he sold his ranch and bought the rights to all his pictures, just as TV was looking for Saturday morning western fare. He marketed all sorts of products and received royalties from comic books, radio and records. He retired to Palm Desert CA in 1953. In 1968 he had surgery to remove a tumor from a lymph gland and, from then on, refused all interview and photograph requests.
IMDb mini-biography by
Ed Stephan <
[email protected]>
Spouse
Grace Bradley (1937 - 12 September 1972) (his death)
Dorothy Sebastian (1931 - 1935) (divorced)
Elinor Fair (December 1926 - 1929) (divorced)
Ruth Miller (1921 - 1924) (divorced)
Trivia
Boyd was Cecil B. DeMille's first choice for Moses in The Ten Commandments (1956). Boyd turned the role down, fearing the Hopalong Cassidy identification would hurt the movie.
The "Hoppies" launched the formula "Trio Western". Boyd was forty when the series started. He got a younger partner to play the romantic leads ('Jimmy Ellison', Russell Hayden, Brad King, 'Bill George', 'Jimmy Rogers (II)' and Rand Brooks) and a second partner for comic relief ('George 'Gabby' Hayes', Britt Wood and Andy Clyde).
In an early movie Hoppy kissed Evelyn Brent on the forehead as she was dying. His fans saw this as unmanly, so all future romance was left to his partners and there was a different leading lady in each picture.
The name of William Boyd's (Hopalong Cassidy) white horse was called "Topper."
Interred at Forest Lawn, Glendale, California, USA, in the Great Mausoleum, Sanctuary of Sacred Promise.
After buying the rights to all of his films, he secured the rights to the name "Hopalong Cassidy", and formed a company called "Hopalong Cassidy Productions".
One of the factors in Boyd's financial success in the distribution of his films on television was that he negotiated deals with individual stations, and not the networks.
Star of the syndicated radio show "Hopalong Cassidy" (1950-1952). The shows were actually recorded between 1948 and 1950.
Inducted into the Hall of Great Western Performers of the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in 1995.
Salary
Hop-Along Cassidy (1935) $5,000
Biography from Leonard Maltin's Movie Encyclopedia:
William Boyd is inextricably linked with the character he most frequently played on-screen, two-fisted western hero Hopalong Cassidy. (So much so, in fact, that his widow, actress Grace Bradley, often still refers to him as "Hoppy.") Born in Ohio, he moved with his family to Oklahoma when still quite young, picking up a regional accent. Working his way across the country to Hollywood with a succession of transient jobs, he landed extra work for Cecil B. DeMille in 1919's Why Change Your Wife? and soon became a DeMille favorite, appearing in many of his films, including The Volga Boatman (1926), King of Kings (1927, as Simon of Cyrene), and the DeMille-produced Road to Yesterday (1925), The Last Frontier and The Yankee Clipper (both 1926), among others. His career was nearly halted by reports of scandalous behavior actually committed by another actor named William Boyd, forcing the DeMille player to become "Bill" and the errant character actor to call himself William "Stage" Boyd.
Bill appeared in modest programmers for Pathe and RKO, including The Painted Desert (1931, a precursor to his successful Westerns), Carnival Boat (1932), Lucky Devils (1933), and Flaming Gold (1934). Initially contracted to play the heavy in Hop-A-Long Cassidy (1935), first in a proposed series based on the novels of Clarence E. Mulford, Boyd wound up playing the title role (much rewritten for him) when first choice James Gleason (an apt choice to play the wiry, wizened little Irishman created by Mulford) nixed the project. It was well received, as were the followups The Eagle's Brood, Bar 20 Rides Train (both 1935), Call of the Prairie, Three on the Trail and Heart of the West (all 1936). Boyd, flanked by sidekicks Jimmy Ellison and George (later "Gabby") Hayes, took audiences completely by surprise in his new incarnation. He went on to make a total of 66 Cassidy Westerns; among the best were Hopalong Cassidy Returns (1936), Texas Trail (1937), In Old Mexico (1938), Three Men from Texas (1940), and Hoppy Serves a Writ (1943).
Fortified with a UA distribution deal, Boyd bought the rights to the character in 1946, but his dozen self-produced pictures weren't very good, and the series petered out. Then Boyd acquired the older pictures from Paramount, and sold them all to TV in 1949. Thus began the Hoppy craze; the 55-year-old actor became an "overnight" sensation, thanks to the films' constant TV exposure. Boyd also produced a half-hour series featuring Hoppy, and shrewdly licensed the character (and his image) for a myriad of products, making himself a multimillionaire. He played Hoppy in a cameo for his old boss, Cecil B. DeMille, in The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), and made dozens of appearances in character at circuses and rodeos. When, in later years, his appearance altered drastically due to health problems (and surgeries), Boyd became a recluse, preferring his fans to remember Hoppy the way he'd been. He contracted Parkinson's disease, and was cared for by Grace, whom he'd married in 1937, for the remainder of his days.
Copyright © 1994 Leonard Maltin, used by arrangement with Signet, a division of Penguin Putnam, Inc.
